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Quick Hits

New Mexico has attracted nationwide attention for its unique response to severe school staffing shortages caused by the Covid-19 Omicron variant.

Although Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s call for state government employees to take leave from their regular jobs to substitute-teach is similar to programs in other states such as Oklahoma, it’s the inclusion of New Mexico National Guard troops that has gained national attention.

Los Lunas Public Schools, a school district just south of Albuquerque was featured last night on NBC Nightly News. Additional stories on National Guard troops teaching, both in and out of uniform, were featured on NPR and the Wall Street Journal .

To become substitutes, state workers must apply for and receive a substitute teaching license. To date, according to NBC, about 50 National Guard troops have qualified, while the state is short about 1,000 substitutes. About 20,000 students across the state are in classes without permanent teachers, the NBC report said.

“All volunteers must fulfill the same requirements as regular substitute teachers and child care workers, including undergoing a background check and completing an online substitute teaching workshop through the Public Education Department for individuals applying to work in schools,” a press release about the program said.

PED added staff to streamline licensing procedures, the release said.

New Mexico has attracted nationwide attention for

Quick Hits

Hefty statewide teacher raises proposed by the Public Education Department gained quick approval in the New Mexico State Senate Education Committee Wednesday.

If passed, the salary hikes would make the minimum starting teacher salary in New Mexico $50,000 for teachers in the first three years of their career, which would make the state more competitive with neighboring states. Level 2, or “professional teachers” would be paid at least $60,000, and Level 3 teachers, those holding a “master teacher” license would earn a minimum of $70,000.

“We have 1,048 teachers missing this year, (whose positions) we are trying to find anybody to fill,” said State Sen. Mimi Stewart, an Albuquerque Democrat and the bill’s sponsor. “We are in a crisis.”

While the committee unanimously approved the bill, not all members were fully supportive. Sen. Craig Brandt, a Republican from Rio Rancho, said New Mexico boosted teacher salaries just two years ago.

“Have we seen less teacher shortages or better results?” Brandt asked. 

Stewart replied that it’s “hard to answer that question because Covid has just upended everything…pre-Covid we were doing better, and now we are not.”

Brandt countered that “we have struggled with education in our state way before Covid, so we can’t just use Covid as an excuse.”

Brandt also said that as a “huge supporter of local control,” he is hesitant to put the salary adjustments in statute, making it a statewide mandate that offers districts no flexibility. “I would prefer we give the districts the money we’re talking about, and let the districts set the tiers…that they need to set,” he said.

The bill was approved by the committee by a unanimous 8-0 vote and now moves next to the Senate Finance Committee.

Hefty statewide teacher raises proposed by the

News

From the perspective of Courtney Jackson, a new Albuquerque Public Schools board member, a quick decision by the administration last week to return to enhanced pandemic protocols in schools perfectly illustrates why she ran and won on a platform of pushing fundamental change to New Mexico’s largest school district.

Board members weren’t given much advance notice of the change, which reimposed outdoor masking of students during recess and a ban on spectators at district sporting events for two weeks. When board members’ phones started ringing and their inboxes flooded with complaints, they were caught flat-footed.

But what really bothered her, Jackson said, was the reaction when she started pushing back on the decision and how it was made at the Jan.19 board meeting.

“What struck me was the arrogance that I felt coming towards those of us who had the gall to question not only the guidelines, but to to question the superintendent and his cabinet’s decision to initiate the new guidelines,” Jackson said in an interview with New Mexico Education later that week.

“I don’t think that that’s necessarily the fault of the cabinet. This is what they are used to. They make decisions.The board says ‘OK! Sounds great!’ I don’t think they are used to pushback and that came to light on Wednesday night.”

Later last week, Jackson said she learned that the previous school board had authorized Superintendent Scott Elder and his team to make changes to Covid protocols without further board action. Still, she said that she and some of her new colleagues want the opportunity to adjust the protocols to loosen outdoor masking requirements, and to allow at least two spectators per player at sporting events.

And on Monday, APS posted on its website a ‘clarification’ amending the pandemic practices order to be more in line with what Jackson had requested. 

“Albuquerque Public Schools has revised its Enhanced COVID-Safe Practices to allow two spectators per student participant at indoor sporting events and other activities. The district also clarified its outdoor masking rule, requiring masks outside only in crowded settings and for close-contact activities,” the website post says.

A new era

As APS enters a new era, with a majority of its seven-member board more aligned with the business community than the teachers union for the first time in recent memory, Elder and his leadership team might well encounter more bumpy moments like last week’s debate over Covid protocols. 

And that’s fine with Jackson. She said she wasn’t elected to sing kumbaya with the district staff.

“As I was running, the challenges that I saw were a lack of strategy, a lack of accountability, and a lack of transparency,” Jackson said. “I saw that APS was dominated by union politics. And APS had a board that was willing to smile and nod.”

Those days are over, Jackson said. “What’s going to have to happen, at least initially, is there might have to be a little bit more pushback, a little more of an assertiveness, about how information is brought to the board and when information is brought to the board,” she said.

If that’s how the new board majority decides to operate, members of the business community will rally behind them. Bruce Stidworthy, president of Bohannan Huston, an Albuquerque engineering, surveying, and mapping company, said he supported Jackson, and fellow newcomers Danielle Martinez and Crystal Tapia-Romero because they promised to bring substantive change to APS.

“I have, for some years, had a realization and an understanding that our educational system was just not achieving at the level that I think it should in terms of academic performance, graduation rates, college readiness, all of those kinds of measures,” Stidworthy said.

So when a slate of candidates not backed by the Albuquerque Teachers Federation gained momentum in last November’s election, Stidworthy was eager to lend his support. As a member of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce’s education committee, Stidworthy pushed for APS to develop a more business-like approach to setting goals and measuring progress against those goals.

“It just didn’t seem like enough of that kind of approach and thinking was happening in the educational system,” he said. “So when the election was coming, we started looking for some candidates who might be more oriented in that direction and got behind them and were successful in some cases.”

Focus on achievement

As basic as it might sound, Stidworthy said his primary hope is that the new board sets academic achievement of APS students as its top priority. “That should be the number one priority in all decisions the board makes.” Instead he said, historically “a myriad of other things tend to have a lot of influence and academic achievement gets kind of pushed to the side.”

That fact became more obvious during the pandemic, Stidworthy said, and now, as the pandemic presumably begins to recede in the wake of the Omicron variant, it is time to put the focus where it belongs. He said he is optimistic that the new board will move decisively in that direction.

Now that four APS board board members are outside the teachers union’s sphere of influence, pushing for change might be more successful, Stidworthy said. “The teachers union is influential. And I would say to some extent it is a block to progress, or it is a defender of the status quo,” he said.

Why did the business community choose this particular election to get more deeply involved? Stidworthy said the pandemic and its impact on kids and their education caught the collective attention of business leaders.

“It was a real awakening and recognition of the fact that our vitality as a community and as businesses is really dependent on the academic preparation that happens in school,” he said.

An end to insularity?

Jackson said APS’ reaction to the pandemic also played a major role in her decision to seek a seat on the board. She said she saw other districts in New Mexico and elsewhere begin to reopen schools a year ago, yet APS continued to opt for more remote learning. This dismayed her, she said.

“Last January when the green light was given by the governor to go back to school, but our Board of Education again said no, my two daughters came to me, at least one of them crying, saying Mommy, can’t you help us? That was kind of a poignant moment for me.”

The opportunity this board has to bring about meaningful change to benefit Albuquerque’s students should help rally support, Jackson said. “‘I’m very energized by what this new board can do. And I think that bringing different perspectives onto this board is good for our kids,” she said.  “It’s good for our teachers. It’s good for our community. We have done things the exact same way for 15 years. It hasn’t worked. Our kids haven’t gotten a better education.

“Those within the community the district who are afraid or angry about the makeup of this new board, I think they really should look at it as this huge opportunity to try something different. And listen to different perspectives.”

One complaint often heard about APS is that for so large a school district, it is unusually insular and resistant to outside ideas. That, too, might be about to change.

Danielle Gonzales, another member of the new board majority, has extensive experience working on education issues from the philanthropic sector. She said APS would benefit from an infusion of new ideas from other cities and states.

Gonzales said from her perspective the school board has not been as resistant to change as district leadership has been, and that, in turn, may stem from a general community hesitancy to adopt outside ideas.

“Albuquerque in general tends to be very skeptical of anything coming from outside of the community, outside of the city, outside of the state,” she said. This means, for example, that the district is unlikely ever to welcome even successful national charter school organizations like KIPP.

“There’s just this notion that we’re different and it’s not going to work here,” she said. “I do think there are ways to use accountability and policy to make the kind of changes that I want to make, but it’s going to be a very uphill battle, because of the general reluctance to change.”

From the perspective of Courtney Jackson, a

Commentary

Editor’s note: This article was written by Myron Lizer, Vice President of the Navajo Nation. Mr. Lizer is Numunu (Comanche) born for Tó’áhání (Near-To-Water Clan), maternal grandfather’s clan is Numunu (Comanche), and paternal grandfather’s clan is Tł’ááshchí’í (Red Bottom People). He has 28 years of retail management experience working for four Fortune 500 companies. He has served on private business boards, private school boards, and guided congregations as a bi-vocational pastor, and participated in community concerns.

In the heart of the Diné Nation, a public school was recognized for its educational commitment to providing students with an opportunity which is currently missing in the rest of New Mexico: a guarantee of personal finance education.

There are 160 traditional public high schools and 36 public charter high schools in New Mexico. According to the nonprofit Next Gen Personal Finance, only two of those schools are recognized as “Gold Standard” schools which require personal finance in order to graduate. One of them is Navajo Pine High School, with which I am very familiar, as the school campus is located north from Navajo Nation’s Capital.

Personal finance education is crucial to our students’ success because it teaches them essential life skills, such as budgeting, saving, investing, credit scores, and the costs of borrowing. Research shows that students who complete these courses are more likely to save money, invest money, create budgets, and seek out lower-cost forms of credit. New Mexico’s students need these tools to break out of generational cycles of poverty.

Sadly, Navajo Pine High School is one of only two schools in New Mexico where students are required to learn these skills before they graduate. New Mexico is one of only five states that does not include personal finance in its education standards. In addition, although New Mexico requires its high schools to offer personal finance as an elective course, only 11% of the state’s students enroll into the program. No wonder New Mexico ranks 47th for overall financial literacy.

In my experience, personal finance is a targeted approach for fighting poverty and establishing a culturally relevant and equitable education. Students learn financial skills that will last them a lifetime. They share the knowledge they receive with family members and friends, and they graduate better prepared for financial decision-making in the workforce or college.

Prior to becoming Vice President of the Navajo Nation, I learned through the school of hard knocks for many years. Being a meat cutter in the Valley of Phoenix, I learned that I had much more to offer in my life than cutting meat at a grocery store. Then, I proceeded to receive higher education in Business Administration at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado – where I gained enough wisdom with finances to operate the family businesses on the Navajo Nation.

Through these experiences, and because I did not have access to a personal finance course in high school, I realized I had missed out on a vital opportunity. As a result, I continue to advocate for personal finance courses across the Navajo Indian Reservation, for our Diné students to become confident and capable of handling their monies.

In Arizona, I am honored to serve on the State Treasurer’s Financial Literacy Task Force, which advances financial literacy for students and families across the state. Just last year, Arizona enacted Senate Bill 1184, making financial literacy and personal finance management a high school graduation requirement. These topics are now included in a required one-semester course in economics.

During the 2021 New Mexico Legislative Session, Representatives Willie D. Madrid, Antonio “Moe” Maestas, Meredith A. Dixon, Jane E. Powdrell-Culbert, and Melanie A. Stansbury sponsored House Bill 163, a bipartisan effort that would have made financial literacy a high school graduation requirement. The bill passed both the House and the Senate Education Committee unanimously, before unfortunately languishing on the Senate Floor for eight days without a vote.

Many organizations are already working toward the enactment of a personal finance graduation requirement, including Think New Mexico, the American Association of University Women, the Credit Union Association of New Mexico, Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, Independent Community Bankers, League of Women Voters New Mexico, and now the Navajo Nation.

Navajo Pine High School has given New Mexico a model of how to incorporate personal finance education into a rigorous and relevant high school education.

I urge Honorable New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham to place personal finance education on the call for the 2022 Legislative Session. I also urge the New Mexico Senate to join the New Mexico House in passing legislation to make personal finance a high school graduation requirement. Ahe’hee’.

Editor's note: This article was written by Myron

Quick Hits

Proclaiming that New Mexico’s fiscal outlook is rosy, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham Tuesday urged legislators to spend big on education, boosting educator pay by at least 7 percent and expanding a free public college program to all state residents.

Those were the only two education-related issues Lujan Grisham raised during her annual address, which sets the stage for the 30-day legislative session.

“The sun is rising on a pivotal day, and I believe everything and anything is truly possible,” Lujan Grisham said during an upbeat, 23-minute speech. “We have right now unimaginable financial resources at our disposal. I believe we can fulfill once and for all, after 110 years of statehood, the destiny of New Mexico as a genuine homestead of the American dream.”

While acknowledging that the Covid-19 pandemic has “wreaked havoc on the lives of every family, every American, every human being around the planet,” Lujan Grisham chose not to mention the devastating toll the past two years has taken on the learning of New Mexico’s schoolchildren. The pandemic has meant there has been little statewide achievement data available during her term as governor.

Instead she focused on paying teachers and other public education workers more, to put them at the head of the class when it comes to regional public school salaries. 

“Let’s give every single educator in this state a 7% raise this year, minimum. That would be the biggest pay bump in recent memory. And it would put us first in the region for average educator pay. They deserve it and we can afford it and it’s the right thing to do,” Lujan Grisham said.

On top of that across-the-board raise, Lujan Grisham endorsed the Public Education Department budget request for $200 million to boost teacher salaries. This would make the minimum starting teacher salary in New Mexico $51,000. Level 2 teachers would be paid at least $60,000, and level 3 teachers a minimum of $70,000.

The Legislative Finance Committee has recommended slightly more modest raises for teachers.

“Some teachers will see a 20% raise this year. And let me be clear, this kind of progress pays for itself,” Lujan Grisham said. “When we support educators, when we retain high quality teachers and keep our schools brimming with talented professionals, our other strategic investments in New Mexico children and in public education are supported and sustained.”

Lujan Grisham also said almost 22,000 more New Mexicans will receive free higher education under a proposed $85.5 million expanded Opportunity Scholarship Program. “The intellectual infrastructure of a nationally competitive state economy is being built right here, right now,” she said.

Proclaiming that New Mexico’s fiscal outlook is

Commentary

Welcome to New Mexico Education! 

New Mexico Education is a news website dedicated to providing strong news coverage and insightful commentary about public education policy and practice in our state.

Our perspective is student-centered. There are approximately 330,000 public school students attending 850 schools throughout 89 school districts and 99 charter schools in New Mexico. Every single one of them deserves an education that will prepare them to reach their full potential and find success in their careers and lives. 

The reality is that we, as a state, are far from delivering on that promise. Inadequate academic preparation limits opportunities for our young people and has a profoundly negative impact on the strength of our workforce, local economy, and communities as a whole. 

At New Mexico Education, we believe it is important to keep everyone–from policy makers to parents to the general public–informed about what is happening in our public schools. Our coverage will bring readers timely and relevant news about education topics – easy to access and share online, and always free. We will call out areas that need attention, celebrate success wherever we find it, introduce our state to dynamic education leaders and innovative ideas, and lift up voices from within our schools and communities. 

We commit to producing fact-based news coverage that asks hard questions and digs for answers that will ultimately improve our schools and students. Our commentaries will be interesting and thoughtful. We want to bring meaningful discussion, new voices, and greater collaboration to the task of building a better education system for New Mexico children. 

New Mexico Education is a project of NewMexicoKidsCAN, a non-profit organization that works daily to improve education in our state. 

As we begin a new legislative session this week, one in which legislators will appropriate nearly $4 billion to K-12 public education, we hope you find our news coverage and commentary informative and thought-provoking. 

Thank you for taking the time to visit our site, and we look forward to hearing from you! You can contact us using our “contact” form to share feedback and offer story ideas or submissions.

Welcome to New Mexico Education!  New Mexico Education

Quick Hits

New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Committee endorsed the Public Education Department’s request for a budget boost of more than 12 percent in 2022, but emphasized some different priorities than those in the department’s request.

The biggest line item in the PED’s request totaled $280 million to raise teacher salaries across the board, and provide a 7 percent increase for “all school personnel.” The committee endorsed the 7 percent pay boost, but cut the amount for teacher base salaries.

PED had requested base salaries for starting teachers to rise to $50,000, for “Level 2” teachers to $60,000, and for the most experienced teachers to $70,000. LFC countered with $48,500, $57,500, and $67,500, respectively.

That reduction brought the PED $280 million request to $212 million in the LFC proposal.

Even at those lower amounts, this would vault New Mexico starting and average teacher salaries ahead of neighboring states, according to information PED provided during a December LFC budget hearing.

The LFC proposal adds $78 million to the state’s Extended Learning Time program, money the PED had not requested. Those funds would “require statewide participation” in the program, which adds 10 days of instructional time to the school year.

In total, the LFC proposed a Public Education Department budget of $3.867 billion, a 12.2 increase over the 2021 operating budget of $3.445 billion. The department had asked for $3.872 billion, a 12.4 percent increase.

New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Committee endorsed the

News

The Covid-19 pandemic has widened already large learning gaps in New Mexico and set the state’s most vulnerable students back even further than they were pre-pandemic, according to a report from the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee.

To address these heightened challenges, school districts must start taking fuller advantage of the state’s  K-5 Plus (25 additional days of school) and Extended Learning Time (10 additional days) programs, both of which have ample resources to address the needs, thanks to “unprecedented levels of state and federal funding made available over the course of the pandemic,” says the “Addressing Pandemic Impacts on Learning” report released last fall.

The report paints a dire picture, estimating that New Mexico’s most at-risk students, who were already at least a half-year behind in learning, lost another significant chunk of learning time because of the pandemic. That lost time ranged from 10 to 60 days, depending on the district.

“We are putting our kids in poverty at that level,” State Sen George K. Muñoz, a Democrat representing the Gallup area, said during a Legislative Finance Committee hearing in early December. “The sprinklers are on and the fire is going nuclear…A 12 percent proficiency rate in math? This is a complete and utter failure.”

Despite being faced with this daunting challenge, 43 of the state’s 89 school districts “elected not to participate in any sort of extended school year, and 14 did not provide a plan to otherwise address lost instructional time, despite being legally required to do so.”

The finance committee’s Program Evaluation Unit recommends in the report that the state legislature consider requiring districts and public charter schools to participate in the Extended Learning Time Program. Further, the report suggests, lawmakers should consider requiring adoption of the K-5 Plus programs in districts “that serve a high proportion of at-risk students or exhibit evidence of lower academic achievement.”

The reason? It will likely take “multiple years” to catch students up, given the pandemic-related learning loss that has occurred.

A survey conducted by a New Hampshire research group for the Public Education Department found that 72 percent of teachers surveyed said their students learned less during the 2020-21 school year than in a typical year.

The finance committee conducted a separate survey, which revealed that teachers found that 40 percent of their students were almost completely disengaged during remote learning. And just 6 percent of teachers reported that their students were “consistently engaged.”

National research has found that hybrid and remote learning are significantly less effective than in-person school. This is especially true for students categorized as at-risk. Despite this, and the return to in-person school in much of New Mexico, some families are choosing to keep their children remote for reasons of safety as well as convenience, the report says.

“Since research has shown that in-person learning leads to better student outcomes, the Legislature and PED should consider how to balance requiring in-person learning while providing high-quality remote learning for students who require accommodation,” the report suggests. 

The report also found that districts across New Mexico have adopted differing strategies for addressing the lost learning time, potentially creating greater inequities. While the K-5 Plus and Extended Learning Time programs could help address this, some districts and teachers have been resistant.

A requirement of K-5 Plus that students stay with their existing teachers for an additional 25 days of instruction “would lead to teacher burnout and place a greater burden on small, rural districts,” the report says. “ As a result, many districts and charter schools declined to extend their school year, forgoing millions of dollars in new state funding.”

This combination of factors has led to fewer districts participating in the K-5 Plus program this year than in past years: 13 districts in the 2021-22 year, compared to 40 in 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic has widened already large

News

Editor’s note: Alisa Cooper de Uribe was New Mexico’s Teacher of the Year for 2021. Anyone who spends a few minutes with Cooper de Uribe, who was raised in Raton, can feel the passion and intelligence she brings to her work. A first-grade teacher for the past decade at the charter K-7 New Mexico International School in Albuquerque, Cooper de Uribe is deeply committed to bilingual education. She is also an outspoken advocate for diversifying the teacher workforce, and substantially increasing teacher pay as a means of attracting more diverse candidates to the profession.

As she concluded her 12 months as teacher of the year, New Mexico Education spoke with Cooper de Uribe about her background and experiences that shaped her approach to teaching, as well as her advocacy work on behalf of bilingual education and a more diverse teaching corps.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New Mexico Education: Please tell us a bit about your background and how you came to the teaching profession and bilingual education.

Alisa Cooper de Uribe: I grew up in Raton and went through the Raton Public Schools system from kindergarten through high school. I left New Mexico to attend Abilene Christian University in Texas. Literature was my passion, and I decided getting an English degree would equip me with skills that I could use in whatever I decided to pursue in graduate school. I also minored in Spanish.

Growing up in Raton, I lamented the fact that I was a monolingual speaker, especially seeing the really rich cultural backgrounds of a lot of my friends. Raton, having been a coal mining town, was extremely diverse. I had friends whose grandparents were from Montenegro, whose grandparents spoke Italian, whose grandparents spoke Greek. And so many friends of mine whose parents and grandparents spoke Spanish. Being in New Mexico, I felt this yearning to be a part of the Spanish language.

So when I started my college studies at the undergraduate level, I just dove into Spanish because it was a lifelong goal for me to finally be at least bilingual if not multilingual. And after I graduated, l moved to New York City for five years, and enrolled in a summer graduate language program at Middlebury College in Vermont. For four summers, I worked toward and got my Master’s Degree in Spanish. For my first couple of years in New York I worked at the Metropolitan Opera in human resources.

NME: How did you first get into education?

Cooper de Uribe: (After the opera) I got a job as an assistant teacher at the Buckley School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Then I moved to the school’s elementary library, ran the library for a couple of years, and eventually became a third-grade teacher at the school. I spent four years at Buckley. I also tutored students in New York City in Spanish.

NME: Buckley is a very high-end, exclusive, expensive private school. How did working there influence your views on educational equity?

Cooper de Uribe: Well, that community was amazing in terms of collegiality, and even though I am 100% a public school teacher, it was fascinating and eye-opening to see what’s possible with the resources at a school like that. It was a phenomenal experience. So I learned a lot there for sure.

As far as equity goes, Buckley was so different from Raton. In Raton, teachers wore multiple, multiple hats and the opportunities that were afforded us were made possible by the legwork of teachers, students and parents putting in innumerable hours of work to fundraise. The Buckley experience made me appreciate that the opportunities we had in our small town were only possible because there were people who were able to make it happen with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. 

There were so many things that were available at Buckley, especially extracurriculars, that I did not have access to as a public school student in a really small district. I had some extraordinary teachers, but just thinking about the resources that they could have had with more funding for public schools, it definitely opened my eyes to the inequities that exist between public and private institutions, but then also among public schools as well.

At Buckley, I just heard the word yes all of the time. Any idea that we had, yes would be the answer. There was never a ‘well, let’s see what we need to do to fund that.’ There were no caveats. It was basically what’s your idea? And the answer was  yes. It was a teacher’s dream in a lot of ways. But in the back of one’s mind, you’re thinking how much you would like for all kids to have access to so many yeses.

Cooper de Uribe fell in love with and married a Mexican national and lived near Mexico City for four years after leaving New York. She worked a variety of jobs in Mexico. Eventually, she and her husband decided to move back to New Mexico to be closer to her family. For her first three years in New Mexico, she worked as a paralegal focused on immigration law. Then she gave birth to a daughter, and during the year she took off from work, decided to pursue becoming a licensed public school teacher. She enrolled in an alternative, online licensure program through Eastern New Mexico University.

NME: How did you end up working at the New Mexico International School?

Cooper de Uribe: My husband was working as an educational assistant there. And so I reached out to the director and said that I would love to do my practicum work at the school, since it is a language immersion school and my focus was on bilingual education. I was able to do my practicum in a first grade and second grade classroom for a semester and work under two different bilingual teachers. I applied for a position after six months of my alternative licensure program and started teaching first grade when my daughter was a year old. I have been there ever since and I love it.

NME: How did you choose to focus on bilingual education?

Cooper de Uribe: As I mentioned earlier, I had this deep sense that multilingualism is a gift that all of us should have and one that I didn’t have when I was a kid. Fast forward way into the future. After having married my husband and then having our daughter. We did a lot of soul searching about what kind of language environment we wanted for our daughter, because she has dual citizenship and we really wanted her to have the opportunity to feel as fully bicultural as possible. And bilingualism was imperative in that. Professionally, there was no question in my mind that where I wanted to go was bilingual education.

NME: You’ve been a Teach Plus Fellow in New Mexico this year, and have focused on diversifying the teacher pipeline. Can you tell us a bit about that work?

Cooper de Uribe: I’ve seen firsthand how challenging it is to find qualified and certified bilingual teachers and that’s just one tiny area of diversity if we’re talking about a diverse teacher pipeline. There’s plenty of folks who speak Spanish, but finding folks who speak Spanish who then also want to go into education and then who also have the means timewise and financially to take the courses and the exams to have the necessary licensure, and then to be able to sustain the immense amount of work that it takes to work in a dual language school. It’s a lot!

NME: What are your strategies for effectively diversifying the teacher pipeline?

Cooper de Uribe: One of the things we have been focusing on is teacher pay. (Editor’s note: Proposed budgets from the Public Education Department and the Legislative Finance Committee request over $200 million in new money to boost teacher pay). We’ve seen that diversity in the teacher workforce is sometimes influenced by factors that could be ameliorated with higher teacher salaries. We’ve been looking at different buckets of how we could focus on promoting teacher salary increases, as a way not only to increase the chances of having a more sustainable future workforce, through  recruitment and retention, but a more diverse teacher workforce.

Having an increase in all levels of salary would definitely make it more accessible to more people who want to go into teaching. Some of it has to do with making the pay for work that teachers do commensurate with the work of other service-oriented professions, such as nursing. The hours and the intensity of the work can be kind of similar and yet there’s a $20,000 average pay difference between teachers in New Mexico and nurses in New Mexico.

Editor's note: Alisa Cooper de Uribe was

Quick Hits

Pledging to establish a collaborative working relationship, the reconfigured Albuquerque Public Schools board swore in four new members Jan. 5 and elected a slate of officers representing a mix of old and new members and differing philosophies.

The board also decided not to assign members to committees, but rather to hold a retreat in the next few weeks to rethink committees and their composition, among other issues.

Incumbent Yolanda Montoya-Cordova will serve as the board president for the next year. Peggy Muller-Aragon, also an incumbent, will serve as vice president, and newly elected member Courtney Jackson will be secretary.

The three officers represent an acknowledgement that the composition of the board has changed, and that a majority of the seven-member board favors heightened accountability and fundamental changes to the district’s operational direction and philosophy.

While Montoya-Cordova has been more aligned with the former board majority, supportive of the district’s overall direction, Muller-Aragon has frequently lined up on the other side of issues. And Jackson ran on a platform of pushing for fundamental changes.

While all three officers were elected unanimously, new board member Josefina Dominguez nominated veteran board member Barbara Petersen as an alternative to Jackson. Petersen, however, declined to accept the nomination.

Petersen said that while having her serve as secretary would provide “beneficial stability,” she wanted to support the spirit of solving problems collaboratively.

The message of unity and collaboration was echoed by all seven board members. Jackson said that voters sent a clear message that they want significant change, and that it is “very important that we balance the executive committee with ideologies and reflect what our community asked for during this election. Collaboration is something we will focus on.”

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Pledging to establish a collaborative working relationship,